Officially Over It - Lani Lynn Vale Page 0,57
child, no,” the judge said. “But what is bad is to force a child on a man that didn’t know that he was having one. Now he has a child with another woman that isn’t his wife. How do you think that makes him feel?”
“I didn’t ask him to take care of this child,” Eerie snapped. “He can go and have babies with his wife and let me have this one.”
“Why do you say that like she’s a disease you don’t want to catch?” The judge tilted her head and inspected Eerie as if she was an interesting bug that’d just crawled across her path.
“I…” Eerie started.
“My client had cancer, Judge Barron. She can’t have any more children naturally. Without the eggs that she had frozen, she has zero chance of having a child ever again. This was her only way to do it. The measures were quite extreme…” her lawyer, Mr. Talb, admitted. “But she wanted a child. A mother’s love knows no bounds.” He pointed at Nathan. “He didn’t want this child. We all know it.”
What a crock of bullshit.
From what I’d heard, her chemo hadn’t taken that option away from her. This option had only been a more viable one because of who the father would be.
I hadn’t heard her actually say it, but I had a feeling that this was convenient for her. That her having this child had nothing to do with her wanting a baby, and everything to do with something else. Something we hadn’t learned quite yet.
“Regardless of whether my client wanted the child or not.” She paused. “Which, might I add, wouldn’t be something that a married man would want—a child that was born while married to his wife. Can you understand the rumors that will flow following this? Nathan Cox isn’t some run of the mill man. He’s a retired baseball player. He’s an upstanding member of this community. He also has his wife to worry about. Him just popping up with a child while being married to his wife will raise quite a few questions, don’t you think?”
The lawyer didn’t have anything to say to that.
Eerie, however, did.
“Nathan doesn’t care about his reputation.” Eerie snorted. “If he did, he wouldn’t have done half the things that he’d done during his baseball career.”
I wanted to throat punch her.
Nathan hadn’t done anything bad during his career.
I would know. I’d borderline stalked him his entire life.
The most risqué thing he’d done was marry me. And that had been way out of his comfort zone.
I kept my trap shut, though.
They didn’t need my input. Especially when all it would’ve been was a couple hundred ‘fuck yous’ aimed Eerie’s way.
“Nathan does care about his reputation. He also cares about his family. Do you know why he quit?” Swayze asked. Not waiting for a reply, she continued. “He quit because the media was pulling up information on his father—his biological father—that had been murdered, along with his mother and unborn sibling. After asking them to cease their probing, they just ramped it up. So to keep himself out of the limelight, he retired.”
“That’s the biggest bunch of…” Eerie started, realizing that what she’d said wasn’t quite as quiet as she’d intended for it to be.
The judge gave her a sharp look that had her trailing off before she’d even finished her sentence.
Seriously, if looks could kill, she’d be a glowing cinder right then.
“Be that as it may,” the judge said, “that has no relevance to what we’re discussing today.”
I gritted my teeth so hard that I heard my molars creak in protest.
“There’s a possibility that he’s not even Nathan’s kid,” Eerie’s lawyer tried. “How do we know that the illegal DNA test performed on this child was done correctly?”
The judge nearly rolled her eyes.
“Fine,” she said. “Another DNA test will be performed immediately. The child’s representative will be the one in control of the DNA test. In fact, he will choose a company to perform this test. Because I know that your next argument will be that the defendant’s wife works there. All parties in agreement?”
The baby’s lawyer, Nathan’s lawyer, and Eerie’s lawyer—who might I add looked as if this was a lost cause—all nodded their agreements.
Eerie looked like she’d swallowed a lemon.
I would’ve laughed had I not wanted that judge’s attention on me.
The judge was scary.
She was scary good at picking through lies—the ones that Eerie had tried to spin all morning—and I didn’t want her to realize that I was a complete and utter